You know the thing about a shark, he’s got … lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. — Robert Shaw as Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)

For most Vancouverites, despite our ocean setting, Jaws is about close as we’ve ever been to a shark — and it was mechanical.

We’ve spotted seals near the docks at Granville Island, and whales and dolphins while sailing on B.C. Ferries, but sharks — big ones anyway — are something you only see while diving in the tropics, right?

Wrong.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada has documented 14 species of sharks — from the tiny two-foot Brown Cat shark to the mammoth, but harmless, 33-foot plankton-eating Basking shark — lurking in the coastal waters of British Columbia.

Also included in the list of 14 B.C. sharks is — gasp — the Great White Shark. The 19-foot monster with its triangle serrated teeth does indeed venture into B.C. waters, but the DFO admits its a rare occurrence when the big fish makes its way up here from the warmer California waters. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates there is a growing population of about 3,000 white sharks in the eastern North Pacific.

That’s not to say we don’t have any big predator sharks who are permanent residents. Salmon sharks, stout 10-footers with sharp “awl-like” teeth, are very common around these parts/

While they feed on salmon (natch) and other bony fish, there has been at least one reported — but widely discounted — attack on a human.

The mouth of Salmon shark. A rookie surfer claims those sharp teeth — or, rather, teeth from a similar looking shark — chewed on her fingers near Tofino in 2012.

In 2012, Campbell River’s Kaitlin Dakers was surfing off Tofino when she suffered severe cuts to two of her fingers. She said a doctor at the Tofino hospital and the surgeon in Campbell River who patched her up both said the cuts were from a very sharp, very quick bit.

A Salmon shark was blamed. However, Nick Dulvy, a professor at SFU who specializes in studying sharks and is the current Canada Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, doubted it.

The reality is that this shark has never been implicated in an attack on a human being, and there’s never, ever been a shark attack in Canada —Dulvy told the Vancouver Sun.

“There are way more [people] killed by strikes of lightning in North America each year, and there are way more people killed by falling television sets each year than they are killed by shark attacks.”

Dulvy said it’s more likely that Dakers was bitten by a seal, while veteran surfers claimed the injury could have been caused by her finger getting caught in her board’s leash.

The endangered basking shark, the biggest and rarest fish on Canada’s west coast and second largest fish in the world behind the whale shark, was photographed last Aug. 8 by marine researcher Wendy Szaniszlo on the Canadian Coast Guard’s 58-metre research ship W.E. Ricker off Brooks Peninsula on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

The gentle giant was nearly wiped out in an act of shark genocide by the federal government.

“Half a century ago Ottawa fitted sharp blades to the bows of its vessels to deliberately kill as many basking sharks as possible for interfering with commercial fishing nets on the B.C. coast,” Vancouver Sun reporter Larry Pynn wrote last November.

Once there were as many 3,000-5,000 basking sharks in B.C., but thanks to a liver oil fishery (1941-1947) and the federal eradication program (1945-1970) the number has dropped to “only a few,” according to the DFO.

“There were a total of eight reported sightings of basking sharks on the B.C. coast from April to September this year, mostly off the west coast of Vancouver Island but also as far north as Haida Gwaii. In addition to the one confirmed, two sightings were considered reliable,” Pynn wrote late year.

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